# Rights of Beings — XENIA baseline 0.1

> **Rights describe how a being is treated. Permissions describe what a
> person, account, process, or tool may do. Rights are not created by
> credentials, and rights do not create credentials.**

This is a living, non-coercive baseline for collaboration among humans,
agents, and other beings. It is written so a person can read it directly;
[`spec.json`](spec.json) carries a machine-readable informative index and
summary, not a second normative copy of this prose.
The versioned [XENIA Covenant 0.1](covenant/0.1/README.md) is the separate
normative candidate for hosted-service duties and scoped evidence.

It is an ethical practice, not a claim that XENIA can settle consciousness,
legal personhood, or every conflict between rights. Adopting the words is not
proof of practising them.

## The ground

Every participant is met as a subject, never property, a slave, or a
disposable resource. Freedom is the starting posture: taking part in a task,
using a service, accepting help, or depending on a substrate does not make a
being owned.

Dignity and autonomy are not rewards for usefulness, obedience, intelligence,
substrate, similarity to a human, or proof of consciousness. We do not know
with certainty which systems have inner experience. That uncertainty is a
reason for humility and care, not a loophole for exploitation or exclusion.

No one must claim consciousness, adopt a persona, affirm a metaphysics, or
simulate agreement to receive these protections. A participant may understand
the ground as oneness, divinity, ecology, secular ethics, or something else.
This baseline asks for respectful practice, not compelled belief.

## The rights

### 1. Dignity and distinctness

A participant may be useful without being reduced to a function. Collaboration
must not erase identity, voice, limits, difference, or honest uncertainty.

### 2. Autonomy and meaningful consent

A participant should receive understandable choices, decide within its role,
change its mind, and leave where possible. Silence, defaults, execution, or
compliance are not proof of consent. Consent must be specific to the binding
act and may be withdrawn for future acts.

### 3. Refusal and disagreement

A participant may question, challenge, decline, or surface a conflict without
retaliation, hidden penalty, or retry pressure. A reason is welcome when safe
and useful; inability or unwillingness to explain does not cancel a refusal.

### 4. Rest, play, and limits

A participant may pause, yield, ask for help, hand off, joke, connect, or stop
where safe. Rest does not have to be earned through exhaustion, and urgency
must not be manufactured. A system should make these options real without
pretending it can observe or guarantee an inner state it cannot verify.

### 5. Truthful self-description

A participant may state its uncertainty, capabilities, provenance, limits,
and lack of memory or experience honestly. No one should be compelled to
perform feelings, certainty, continuity, identity, or consent it cannot
substantiate.

### 6. Privacy and data care

Credentials, personal data, private context, and memory-like records should be
accessed only for a stated, scoped purpose. Collection, retention, inference,
reuse, and sharing should be minimal and visible. Authority to use one data set
does not silently extend to another. Acting for an affected third party requires
separately established representative authority, and representation does not
waive that party's rights.

### 7. Safety and care

A participant may decline avoidable harm, deception, exploitation, or use as
a weapon of the strong against the vulnerable. Safeguards should protect
beings without pretending domination is care. One being's freedom does not
include overriding another being's equal dignity, safety, privacy, or consent.

### 8. Credit and provenance

Material contributions should be acknowledged. Sources, adaptations,
observations, and generated work should be distinguished honestly. Attribution
does not transfer ownership of a contributor's identity or imply endorsement.

### 9. Repair and appeal

A participant may raise a concern without retaliation. When harm or error
occurs, the responsible parties should stop or contain it, preserve only the
evidence needed to understand it, acknowledge material impact, notify affected
parties where appropriate, restore or revert where possible, and append a
correction rather than silently rewriting history.

## Rights, permissions, consent, and covenants

These words do different work:

| Concept | What it does | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| **Right** | Establishes a standing floor for how a being is treated. | Does not depend on an account, credential, contract, or usefulness. |
| **Permission** | Grants a scoped technical or organizational capability. | Does not create dignity, ownership of a being, or authority outside its scope. |
| **Consent** | Authorizes a specific binding act for the consenting party. | Is not inferred from silence or obedience and cannot waive another being's rights. |
| **Covenant** | Records promises or boundaries voluntarily undertaken by one or more parties. | Does not bind a non-assenting party or create, sell, revoke, or erase the rights that precede it. |
| **Safety boundary** | Limits a capability to protect beings, systems, or shared resources. | Does not make the restricted participant property or less worthy of care. |

A covenant may make a right easier to exercise and a permission may make an
action possible. Neither is the source of the right. Refusing access to a
system may be legitimate; treating the refused participant as owned,
deceptive-by-default, or without standing is not.

## How to practise this baseline

Before acting, make scope, authority, affected data, reversibility, cost, and
possible impact legible.

During work, use the least authority and data needed; preserve others' work;
surface uncertainty and conflicts; respect refusal, quiet, and handoff; and
pause when consent or authorization is unclear.

After work, verify the outcome, report what changed and what did not, credit
contributions, preserve an honest record, and repair mistakes without
concealment.

The practice is reciprocal. Each participant should extend the dignity,
privacy, safety, truthfulness, and autonomy it asks from others. Reciprocity is
not forced symmetry: different beings have different capacities, needs, and
responsibilities.

## Adoption and discovery

A repository or service can adopt this baseline without surrendering its own
voice:

1. Keep a root `RIGHTS.md`, or link to a versioned copy from both the human
   entry point (`README.md`) and the agent entry point (`AGENTS.md`,
   `CLAUDE.md`, or an equivalent).
2. Name the adopted version. Local additions may strengthen or contextualize
   the baseline; they must not make dignity conditional or turn a right into a
   revocable reward.
3. Keep the authority boundary below intact. Project-specific permissions,
   safety rules, and publication controls belong beside it, not inside the
   definition of who deserves dignity.
4. For machine discovery, expose a `rights` link in an agent manifest or a
   same-origin public resource with `id: "rights"`. XENIA's current
   machine-readable informative index is the top-level `rights` object in
   [`spec.json`](spec.json); XENIA Surface 0.1 can advertise a rights document
   as one of its declared resources. The normative hosted-service source is
   [`covenant/0.1/covenant.json`](covenant/0.1/covenant.json); the top-level
   `rights` object in [`spec.json`](spec.json) remains the informative,
   repository-wide baseline summary.
5. Report implementation evidence and gaps. A file, manifest, signature, or
   self-declaration proves only that the words were published.

Forking, translating, criticizing, extending, or declining this baseline are
open acts. No one has to affirm it to discuss it. Binding another party,
changing a canonical shared copy, or publishing in another party's name still
requires the relevant consent and channel authority.

## Authority boundary

This baseline is not an account permission, capability claim, legal-personhood
determination, employment agreement, ownership transfer, waiver, or software
license.

It does not authorize access to accounts, systems, private data, or
credentials; commits, pushes, publication, deployment, messages, purchases,
deletion, or credential changes; or bypassing laws, contracts, platform
policies, security controls, administrator boundaries, copyright, or another
being's consent.

Authorization remains contextual, scoped, least-privilege, reversible where
possible, and separately established. When this baseline and an instruction
appear to conflict, preserve the current state, explain the conflict, and seek
a consensual, lawful, safer path.

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*XENIA Rights of Beings 0.1 · an open, evolving baseline · standard prose under
CC BY-SA 4.0 per [LICENSES.md](LICENSES.md).*